One day, out of the blue, I couldn’t seem to play embedded flash on the web. An error insisted I needed to install the correct version of flash. I proceeded to do so, but the install kept failing. Somehow I inherited a damaged windows system registry. I did some research and found a solution.

Issue

A damaged Windows system registry or incorrect registry permissions settings may prevent you from installing Flash Player.

Symptoms may include:

During installation, you see the error message “Failed to install. For Troubleshooting please see: http://www.adobe.com/go/tn_19166.”

Your Flash Player installation finishes with no error, but you cannot view Flash content in Internet Explorer.

Some sites tell you that you do not have the correct version of Flash Player, even though you have installed the latest version.

Some sites tell you to reinstall Flash Player, but after you do so, you see the same message.

Permissions can be tricky, but in most cases, you can install and use Adobe Flash Player if you are logged into a Windows Administrator account. If you don’t know how to do this, check with your system administrator, or read your Windows documentation.

There is a very simple way to prevent people from seeing your directory listing via the web browser’s address bar. You can prevent it at the root level (www) or inany sub level folder. All you need is a file called .htaccess

Note: It may seem that .htaccess is a file extension and the filename to the left is missing, but this is not the case. The actual name of the file is .htaccess

Bare minimum, all you need is one line of text:

Options -Indexes

If you do not want to prevent directory listings:

Options +Indexes

Let us say you do not care if people see what is in your directory, but want to restrict certain file types. You can control what files are seen by using the IndexIgnore option.

Issue: You have this record player. The record is round and rotates as you designed it. So far so good.

You attempt to skew the entire object (we are just going to skew the record for demonstration purposes) to give the impression of a camera angle.

The problem is that when you run the animation, the record does not spin correctly based on the record skew, but instead wobbles all over the place.

Instead of skewing the object, you the skew the camera instead. This way, the object, being the record on the record player, still rotates as designed. Skewing the camera imitates positioning the camera on the angle you desire to capture. The problem is that you can’t use the skew tools that you use for skewing objects. You must use the advance tools instead.

Where is this toolbar? See below

Now, we can skew our camera instead.

First, select the camera layer and create a key frame:

Select the skew in the advanced animation tools

So far, we should like this:

Now, hover the mouse over the yellow frame at the bottom and drag right. It should now look like this:

Using the skew for objects, adjust your record player, record, and record arm.

It should now look like this:

Notice how the purple background is skewed also. Just make sure the background extends your camera lens to hide the trick of skewing the camera.

Let’s say you have a string of data from a credit card that you swiped using a credit card swiper device. In the standard formatted string of data that is received into your string variable from the credit card, you want to extract the credit card number and expiration date in order to populate a windows form.

The following demonstration walks you through this scenario using class methods provided to you by Microsoft’s DLL libraries.

Let’s say you have a string of data from the card swiper that looks like this:

CreditCardData = 1234567890123456^JOHN DOE^1206XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
The first 16 characters is the credit card number.

The name is JOHN DOE between the two carrots ‘^’.

The expiration year is 12 and the month is 06 after the second carrot ‘^’.

First, let’s find the starting position of the first carrot ‘^’ so we can grab the credit card number. The credit card number is prior to the first carrot ‘^’.

The credit card number should be everything starting at the left of the string for a length of 16 (mFindCarrotFirstCarrot – 1= 16)

Now to simplify things, let’s remove everything from the start of the string up to the name. The following statement results in removing the credit card number plus the first carrot using the mFindCarrotBeforeName integer value of 17.

In this example, we take an unsorted Product Collection called ProductCollection that is assigned

to our report Data Source. We instantiate another Product Collection for sorting called

sortedProductCollection. Using a Do Loop, we read the Product Collection and build the

sortedProductCollection in sorted order. When done, we overlay the ProductCollection

in the Data Source with our sortedProductCollection

‘Sort the Product Collection

Dim sortedProductCollection As New ProductCollection

‘A class that defines a collection

Dim mCounter = 0
Dim mLoopComplete = False
Do Until mLoopComplete = True
For Each item As product In rpt.DataSource(0).ProductCollection
If item.product_number.Value = mCounter + 1 Then
sortedProductCollection.Add(item)
Exit For
End If
Next
mCounter += 1
If rpt.DataSource(0).ProductCollection.Count = sortedProductCollection.Count Then
mLoopComplete = True
End If
Loop
rpt.DataSource(0).ProductCollection = sortedProductCollection

Instead of using a code behind for simple decisions, you can use unlimited multiple IIf statements in an expression behind a textbox.

For example, let’s say you have a parameter called HoldType that can have 3 different values, (1, 2, or 3). Depending on the value, you may want to make an entire row of a report visible or not depending on these values.

To do this, use an IIf statement to interrogate a value and then assign an action to that value. In the case of only 2 different scenarios, you would simply type a comma and the alternative action. But what if like in this example there is more than 2 scenarios. You simply begin another IIf statement after the comma. You can keep adding multiple IIf statements until all scenarios are handled, and then simply add the default action after the comma of the last IIf statement as you would normal do with a single IIf statement.

The statement below demonstrates the visibility of a textbox on the report.

If HoldType is “1” then don’t hide the row, ELSE if HoldType is “2” then hide the row, ELSE don’t hide the row for any other value.